What I Need To Know: Finding answers to my essential question will help me in a lot of ways. It will allow me to put a lot of time and effort into what I would do on a day to day basis as a physical therapist. This, in turn, will allow me to see if this is the right career for me in the future. It will benefit my life today by allowing me to gain extra knowledge for injury prevention and injury recovery. This will help me with my sports and will give me an extra leap ahead when going into the medical field. This will definitely make a difference in my life by allowing me to see if this is what I wanna do as my career for the rest of my life. If I find this dull or boring, that will be a sign that I need to take a new direction. Knowing a lot about new strategies will help me in my mentorship and will prepare me for the future as I come up with my own exercises for future patients.
What I Know Or Assume: I don’t know much when it comes to exercises for specific parts of the body. I have seen physical therapy in action at my mentorship and from my family and friends, but on my own, I wouldn’t know as much as I would need to. Sports and an eager mind for the anatomy has helped me greatly. Usually, when I have an injury, I ask my doctor and athletic trainer a lot of questions about why this has happened or what made this happen. This has helped me build up a little bit of background knowledge when it comes to injuries. My mentor has taught me a lot about vertigo and the crystals in the mind, so I feel that I have a better knowledge about balance and activities I could do with patients than I had before. Your search: Getting information from patients and getting information from physical therapists are going to give you two very different kinds of date. I don’t think either one is biased. Both just come from two very different perspectives. My mentor is very honest and isn’t afraid to admit where she went wrong or has made mistakes because of her strong work ethic and willingness to get better everyday. Different patients have different opinions on their physical therapy treatments, and I got to see many different sorts of attitudes, especially when they all completed this special survey my mentor gives them to be discharged. It basically lets us know how efficient they thought their therapy was. My mentor gave me a lot of honest information about what she learned in college and what she has had to learn along the way. Galileo was a very good source of information as it gave me a look at many different experiments with different exercises and different groups of patients. This was based on fact whereas my information from patients and my mentor was based on opinions. What I Discovered: What I discovered is that my mentor didn’t just come right out of college knowing about all of these different techniques. She came up with many on her own using trial and error and sought out advice from experienced physical therapists. It has been a learning process for her. She has also taught me a lot about the different types of physical therapists, and how what she saw in an outpatient clinic was very different than the work she does now. She even offered me the advice of interning at both just to get the full feel of physical therapy. There, you see younger kids and more sports injuries that are looking to get fixed as quickly as possible. I have seen that my mentor uses different activities with her patients every time she sees them rather than using the same exercises over and over again. She told me this helps to reach all the parts of the injured muscle or problem area. |
Capstone Presentation: |